The Silver Skull by Mark Chadbourn

take pity and toss them a coin.

    Outside a tavern, amid heaps of vomit and reeking lakes of urine, people sprawled drunkenly across the street with no one to move them on. The noise from the open doors and windows of the tavern was deafening, inebriated conversations delivered at a bellow against a backdrop of fiddle music and ferociously contested gambling.

    Occasionally brawls would begin, but they were swiftly broken up by men armed with cudgels who kept the order among the unruly class. They were likely in the pay of the gangs, Will guessed, ready to be sent to the defence of any member of the community being dragged out to face justice.

    One man lay facedown, his skull split open and his blood flowing into the mud and the urine. Will saw the hands of his own men going instinctively to their swords, knowing what they would face if they were found out. The close call with the Enemy and his dog had unnerved them all.

    As Will prepared to enter the tavern to search for information, an uproar echoed from the end of the street where men and women ran towards the entrance to one of the tenements.

    "Someone is in danger," Will guessed from the tone of the cries. "Let us investigate."

CHAPTER 11
    SPECIAL_IMAGE-00020.jpg-REPLACE_ME

    SPECIAL_IMAGE-00079.jpg-REPLACE_ME s Will and the others were taking their first steps into Alsatia, Grace was already progressing into the filthy, smoke-filled streets.
    Marlowe had always liked her, and it had not taken a great effort to worm Will's destination out of him. Although he would not speak directly of the nature of Will's business in the Thieves'
    Quarter, his occasional unguarded comment told Grace her instincts were correct: there was some connection to jenny's disappearance. Marlowe warned her of the dangers awaiting a young woman alone in Alsatia-it was not the court, it was certainly not Warwickshirebut the drive to discover the truth about her sister overrode all else.

    But as she stood on a street where a man at a table took receipt of purses, jewellery, silk handkerchiefs, and occasionally coats and boots, she cursed her ignorance. She thought she would be able to find Will easily-he was often recognised and hailed by upstanding men and women-but here there was no trace of his passing, and she was lost, and her perfumed handkerchief could not keep the foul smells from her nose. And now a group of four men were casting surreptitious glances her way, and muttering among themselves. She was not naive; she recognised the hunger in their eyes.

    At least a woman alone was no threat and she was not troubled by the majority of the other unsavoury characters she saw. But as she attempted to retrace her steps to the London she knew, the men began to follow her.

    Her heart beat faster, but she tried not to give in to panic, for she knew that would only attract more unwanted attention. Keeping her head down, she skipped a stinking puddle, unsure whether she should move down the centre of the street where everyone would see her or keep in the shadow of the tenements where she could be snatched in through one of the open doors.
    Opting for somewhere between the two, she kept up a fast pace, deciding that she hated that place more than anywhere she had been in her life. Every face had either a hint of cruelty or the stain of life's crushing ills. She saw no hope anywhere. The desolation made her yearn for Will; he had kept his own hope alive in the face of, as she saw it, all reason. He truly believed jenny still lived. More than anything she didn't want that hope crushed, but she feared the worst. Soon he might find out the truth, and what then for him?

    That thought prompted a stark memory: on the fourth day after jenny's disappearance when a black carriage had arrived at the home of Will's family just as night fell, a waning moon casting a silver light over the Warwickshire cornfields. A mysterious visitor, armed guards at the door, and then Will emerging at dawn to tell her, "There